General Purpose map of London

Hans van der Maarel

Posted 24 August 2011 - 05:31 AM

Hans van der Maarel

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I'm working on a general purpose tourist map of London. Style-wise, I've let myself be inspired by the Zoomable Map (which is currently my standard "map to have in my pocket" whenever I'm in London) as well as Kevin Paul's Stavanger color scheme.

This is still very much a work in progress, missing some of the more touristy bits of information, but I was hoping to get some feedback. I've made a conscious decision not to label any of the smaller roads for now, but I may go ahead and do about 50% of those anyway. The reasoning behind this is that the Zoomable Map offers a very clean picture, which I like a lot.

Source data is all OS VectorMap District (free data from the Ordnance Survey). I had initially considered OpenStreetmap, but this is just so much better in terms of data structure and consistency (not without errors though)

ProMapper

Posted 24 August 2011 - 08:03 AM

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I'm working on a general purpose tourist map of London. Style-wise, I've let myself be inspired by the Zoomable Map (which is currently my standard "map to have in my pocket" whenever I'm in London) as well as Kevin Paul's Stavanger color scheme.

The sample looks good. The data is just great and in comparison the OSM data looks to be a total mess. My tuppence, abbreviate Road, Street, Terrace, and so on, it will give lot more space to pack in more labels .

Dennis McClendon

Posted 24 August 2011 - 01:12 PM

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I would probably go in and redraw a few selected features that have a very obvious classical geometry, such as the circus near Lancaster Gate or Marble Arch corner. I hate to think of John Nash making a perfect circle on the ground only to have some dataset 200 years later dumb it down into an irregular polygon.

I'm a little puzzled by the narrow streets and wide sidewalks in a lot of places. It looks as if the street centerlines have been assigned arbitrary widths as part of a hierarchy, while the building footprints are accurate and so the difference is absorbed by "ground," which we read as sidewalk/footpath.

I don't quite understand what's being symbolized in the parks. There should be grass, walkways, and (maybe) trees. But the tree cover seems to be in some cases indicating walkways, which then disappear once you reach open grass. The trees also seem awfully dark.

Finally, the colors on the zoomable map are much subtler. These seem rather intense.

As Dennis points out, there's indeed next to no manual redrawing on this one. I've also assigned standard line widths to the various classes of roads, with the least important ones getting a very thin line. I'm not too sure about combining this with the buildings (they seem accurate, but aren't really).

The data on parks is kinda funny, it only shows "wooded areas". The light green background in Hyde Park is one of the things I added myself. Footpaths, which would be in the roads layer, aren't included. I may have to source those from OpenStreetMap.

Color scheme is pretty intense indeed, but I wanted to give this pallette a try. Have some other ideas up my sleeve as well.

It's great to have you guys as a resource, I am not nearly tough enough on myself when I'm designing, and sometimes clients don't have a lot of input in terms of style.

Can you give a bit more detail on the scale, size and output medium. Is this the full extend of the map. Is it to be published and when ect...

I did notice a few things.
Hyde park. As Dennis mentioned, If the thin lines represent trails or walkways, then the network is lost in the lighter shades (non trees areas I assume).
There are 2 Marble Arch symbols. Because these symbols are abrasct, I can't tell what they represent without a reference to a legend. So I would tend to use more 'realistic' symbols overall.
I don't know the output scale, but if I compare map detail with font size, I would have to say that some form of generalization will have to be done.

thamesidemedia

Posted 16 November 2011 - 06:54 PM

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Generally a nice map of London. But it's a big city - how much of London have you included, and are you doing it for a client or for your own interest? Would you be interested in configuring it as a royalty free base?

Hans van der Maarel

Posted 21 November 2011 - 10:27 AM

Hans van der Maarel

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Generally a nice map of London. But it's a big city - how much of London have you included, and are you doing it for a client or for your own interest? Would you be interested in configuring it as a royalty free base?

As the project I started it for fell through I'm completing it with the intention of selling it, primarily through Avenza's PDF Maps store, but other avenues are worth looking into as well of course.

As for the area covered, It's from Sheperd's Bush in the west to St Kahterine's Docks in the east, Camden Market in the north to Vauxhall Bridge in the south.